Asking for Humanity

Margin Notes is where various contributors offer their short takes, brief ruminations, spot reviews (book, film, art, even the Internet, god help us).

If you are interested in adding your voice, give the section a careful read and email us at hawaiireviewofbooks -at- gmail.com with Margin Notes and your topic in the subject line.

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Google. Amazon. Meta. Netflix. Spotify. All use algorithms to predict which content will interest us the most.

GPS is also algorithmic. Facial recognition is, too. Technology has become a carnival sideshow—a guesser of age and weight, a fortune teller that prophesizes our desires and futures. I once read that prophecy is our most disturbing form of hedonism. That rings true to me. And now, prophecy has become increasingly mathematical. Math and hedonism? It sounds like an odd pairing, but it feels like the world we live in.

The irony is that, despite these advanced tools of prognostication, and our bacchanalian glee in predicting the future, we have seemingly become worse at seeing what’s coming. Obama beat Clinton. Trump beat Clinton. Trump beat impeachment, handily. Shoot, the Cincinnati Bengals made it to the Super Bowl. Then, of course, there’s Covid-19, which seeped from a seafood wholesale market (or for those with a more conspiratorial sensibility, a lab) and spread across the world, killing six million people. It took out some tigers as well. And we may have caught it from bats.

Perhaps there were epidemiologists who saw a pandemic coming, but one spawned in a farmer’s market? One that killed humans and snow leopards alike? Years ago, novelist Carl Hiaasen lamented that fiction could no longer keep up with the preposterousness of reality. He was right. However, it hasn’t stopped us fiction writers from trying. If anything, considering our realities are now partially virtual and seemingly in constant flux, storytellers have no choice but to speculate.

“Just like everyone else, I have no idea what the future will look like. But I take my best guesses when writing fiction.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s last three novels have been either fantasy or speculative fiction. Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel, Machines Like Me is speculative, though he has snobbishly denied such labels. Renowned writers like Colston Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy have all dabbled in the speculative. After winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his World War II-based All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr wrote Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is very much speculative, very much science fiction. And here at home, as far as novels set or partially set in Hawai‘i go, the one that has received the most national attention this past year is Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise. The novel is set in three time periods a hundred years apart (1893, 1993, and 2093). The 2093 section is undoubtedly dystopian. The 1893 section is unquestionably speculative.

Prestigious awards, both in the book and film world, are notoriously stuffy. Comedy, science fiction, and fantasy are routinely snubbed. However, in last year’s Emmy Awards, four of the eight series nominated for best primetime drama series were speculative, sci-fi, or both (The Boys, Lovecraft Country, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Mandalorian). And for this year’s Academy Awards, Dune and Don’t Look Up were nominated for best picture.

I’m not saying that the world of storytelling is dramatically changing, but it’s tilting at the very least. Some of this probably has to do with the continuing rise in popularity of the video gaming industry, whose titles have always been frequently sci-fi and fantasy. The first generation of gamers are entering middle age. They are beginning to assume leadership in the more traditional industries of publishing and filmmaking. As a gamer who just turned 49, I’m not immune: Soho Press published my first sci-fi noir, Midnight, Water City, in 2021; two more are on tap.

But it’s not just games and the rise of Gen-Xers into positions of power, is it? When I began writing my own speculative fiction, part of what steered me in this direction is the lack of realness in my world. Or maybe my world is too real, not in the naturalistic sense, but in the sense that whatever visceral adventure or misadventure that guided my writing has evaporated, and now a huge chunk of my current reality is spent staring at a screen.

The pandemic, of course, exacerbated this. But there is also this sense of looking at what’s outside and liking less and less of what I’m seeing. Homelessness. Other people lumbering up and down city blocks, just not looking… well. Zombie-like, in fact. Then there’s gridlocked beaches. Gridlock in general. People’s eyes and ears glued to their smart phones. It’s real, but it looks less and less like real life, doesn’t it?

I sympathize with people with wild notions of what reality is. A simulation, according to Oxford philosopher Nick Bolstrom. A multiverse, according to MIT physicist Max Tegmark. Those are far more sexy concepts than the one I suspect is true. We are just clinging atop a spinning gutter ball hurling to oblivion. And whatever reality once dazzled us, no longer does.

My wife and I have taken our younger daughter to the zoo on multiple occasions. She was bored each time. What’s so good about seeing a miserable-looking caged animal, especially when one can watch a girl turn into a red panda in Pixar’s latest film, or play the role of a murderous giant spider in a multiplayer game on an iPhone?

So, like many others, my family and I spend more and more time zoning out on screen time. I hide in books, both those of other writers, and my own. I occasionally jack into the doom scroll, which is stuffed with prophecy. Many more will be tragically slaughtered in Ukraine. Putin’s finger hovers above the nuke button. Cyberattacks incoming. Oil prices will continue to go up, driving the expensive of everything else up, too. World War III has once again become a possibility. All the while, temperatures will continue to spike in this century. Sea levels rise. More severe drought and hurricanes.

“What the algorithms may never get is that the hedonistic pleasure of prophecy is more effectively expressed through art than math.”

At this point, my imagination becomes detached, and I become a cruel contrarian of sorts. What if climate change will actually be more catastrophic in the middle of continents as opposed to shorelines? What if the Ukrainians, led by a comedian turned hero, shock the world and not only defeat Russia, but burn Moscow to the ground? What if something that we don’t see coming rocks us suddenly and harder than Covid-19? A solar flare? A geothermal disaster?

I speculate and cram some of my thoughts into my fiction. I imagine the worst, but just some different worsts than what is being widely speculated. Because, after bearing witness to the last couple of decades, my algorithm is simply this: Imagine a future. Now, take at least half of what you predict and predict the opposite.

No one is right all the time, and no one is wrong all the time. One would need to be an oracle or an inverse oracle for that to be true. My guess is half of what we all believe is going to happen will not come to pass while the other half probably will. Then, there’s a boatload of stuff that will occur that we won’t even see coming.

In the meantime, we will speculate based on knee-jerk journalism, deliberately false information, corporate algorithms, and our own disturbed imaginations. We will speculate based on speculations.

Just like everyone else, I have no idea what the future will look like. But I take my best guesses when writing fiction. The present feels tedious, my existence, beyond the confines of my home, feels powerless, and characters with tedious lives absent of power are characters that I don’t enjoy inventing.

Sure, the state of the world is preposterous, but exhaustingly and chillingly so. It lacks a sensual or kinetic quality. A sense of discovery outside of the technological. I don’t want to learn more about cryptocurrency or NFTs. I don’t fear AI. Instead, I’m afraid we are becoming artificially intelligent. Bad robots desensitized and coldly programmed, stripped of healthy skepticism, empathy, and any zest for life.

I remember being a child and wishing that I could fast-forward to adulthood. I had an aching desire to seize control of my own life. I have the same desire to fast-forward now as a middle-aged man, but for different reasons. I simply want to escape the confines of the present.

This is why I write speculative fiction. I’m guessing it’s why many other writers have turned to the genre as well. The market of people who want to fast-forward has grown, and as writers, our own desires to fast-forward are meeting the market’s demand. People who ask “what if” are typically people unsatisfied with “what is.” More and more people are asking “what if,” and what the algorithms may never get is that the hedonistic pleasure of prophecy is more effectively expressed through art than math.

Many storytellers have willingly become weathermen stranded in storms, pointing at murky horizons, and wondering what exists beyond. Hardly any of us forecast clear skies ahead.

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Image by Miguel Alcântara.